In-depth, detailed assessments of the trends and issues shaping transatlantic debates.
Introduction “Would you rather have the bitter truth or more sweet lies?” This is the question posed by an assertive series of videos produced by the State Department in recent months, targeting Russian audiences, that juxtapose statements by Russ [...]
Introduction As the de facto gateway to the vast troves of information available online, search services play a critical role in the modern information ecosystem. They are often the starting points for people’s questions about the world around the [...]
Executive Summary Ukraine has one of the most vibrant civil societies in the world. In the decade since it launched and led the Revolution of Dignity, Ukrainian civil society has held successive governments’ feet to the fire while at the same time [...]
Executive Summary Ukraine has become a different country over the past decade. Compared to the closed post-Soviet oligarchy that it was before the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine is now an open society governed as a vibrant democracy that resp [...]
Introduction In recent years, political podcasting has boomed in the United States, with new series emerging across the political spectrum. Due to the medium’s decentralized nature, it is difficult to grasp the total audience for these shows, but [...]
Executive Summary The October 15, 2023 Polish parliamentary election will not be fair. The country’s last fair election was in 2015, when the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) came to power and promptly set about undermining constitutional govern [...]
Introduction Democratic backsliding in old, new, rich, and poor democracies has accelerated, as International IDEA, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) have all studied. Yet they have been slow to res [...]
Introduction When people perform tasks in a complex work environment, mistakes are bound to happen. Election systems are no exception. Although the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections in the United States were free, fair, and well-adminis [...]
Executive Summary Remarkably, while fighting for their lives against Russian invasion, Ukrainians continue to wage their long internal battle against oligarchy and corruption. Ukraine is midway through this generational struggle, which began on th [...]
Introduction Protections are baked into each stage of US election administration. For example, nearly every state has paper records of each vote, safeguards to ensure the chain of custody of those ballots, and the ability to go back and count each [...]
Executive Summary The greatest threats facing the two most consequential elections in and around Europe in 2023—Turkey in May and Poland in the fall—come from autocratic corruption within these two backsliding democracies. Both these countries are [...]
Introduction As a result of the 2020 and 2022 federal elections, the job of administering elections has dramatically changed in the United States, and the demands on the dedicated officials that run our elections have also increased. The people wh [...]
Federico Castiglioni is a Researcher working in the program “EU, politics and institutions” at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). Etienne Soula is a research analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy as the German Marshall Fund of the U [...]
Introduction Insider threats are not new to election administrators. As the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) director, who formerly served as director of elections for South Carolina, recently noted, “[Elec [...]
This article was jointly published by the Istituto Affari Internazionali and the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Views expressed are the authors' alone. Introduction Should the polling prove accurate, Italy will soon be governed by its most radi [...]
China's comprehensive sanctions regime against Lithuania underlines the grave need for Europe to bolster its resilience to economic coercion. As EU officials begin the process of adopting the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) and other strategies to p [...]
Introduction False claims of a stolen election in 2020 shook U.S. democracy to its foundation, seeding ideas and establishing behavior that will reverberate in elections for years to come. The unprecedented number of false claims alleging election [...]
Introduction The 21st Century started with the promise of how technologies can be used to bolster, not undermine, democracies, activism, and human rights. However, the maddening pace at which digital technologies have evolved in recent years means [...]
Executive Summary As the war in Ukraine unfolds, Russian propaganda about the conflict has gotten a boost from a friendly source: government officials and state media out of Beijing. In multiple languages and regions around the world, China’s “wol [...]
The Alliance for Securing Democracy’s David Levine and the Carter Center’s Avery Davis-Roberts make the case that more nonpartisan observation is critical to ensuring the integrity of future elections and provide steps for improving nonpartisan obs [...]
Introduction and Summary Kleptocracies do not stop at their own borders. The same actors, networks, tactics, and resources that they wield to prevent democracy and rule of law from sprouting at home are also repurposed for foreign aggression. Whil [...]
Executive Summary When kleptocrats, foreign intelligence services, homegrown autocrats, and other malign actors weaponize corruption to undermine U.S. democracy, their financial secrecy relies upon the services of ten sectors of U.S. professionals [...]
ASD's Nad’a Kovalčíková and Globsec's Dominika Hajdu and Miroslava Sawiris present the Alliance for Healthy Infosphere's Ten Transatlantic Principles for a Healthy Online Information Space. The U.S. Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, fueled by dis [...]
ASD Elections Integrity Fellow David Levine and the Open Source Election Technology Institute’s Global Director of Technology Development and Open Standards Edward Perez lay out ways to bolster election integrity by strengthening the security of el [...]
Introduction The 2020 presidential election was called the most secure in U.S. history, largely due to efforts to protect the nation’s different physical and cyber infrastructure. This was a triumph considering the physical, cyber, and even human [...]
This paper is the second in a series on technology policy through the lens of national security, published in partnership with the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. Read the first paper on the digita [...]
Executive Summary The Biden administration has a historic opportunity to unify U.S. domestic and foreign policy through an aggressive mission to combat corruption and kleptocracy. Middle-class Americans are frustrated by perceptions of corruption [...]
Introductory Letter Governments, civil society and industry recognize the importance of a secure, stable and accessible cyber and digital information space, especially in today’s challenging and unpredictable environment. In November 2018, the Fr [...]
Introduction and Summary In his push for bipartisan efforts on voting rights legislation, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) warned that “the lack of transparency in many campaign finance rules provides multiple avenues for foreign and national adversaries [...]
Executive Summary The 2016 presidential election served as a wakeup call to the threat of authoritarian interference, and in the years since, many segments of American society—from the federal government to private companies and civil society gro [...]
ASD’s Elections Integrity Fellow David Levine and the Center for Democracy and Technology's Senior Technologist in Elections and Democracy William T. Adler urge President Biden to establish a bipartisan presidential commission to recommend ways to [...]
Executive Summary In recent years, U.S. government officials have normalized a damaging notion: that soliciting or participating in foreign interference in a U.S. election will not be prosecuted. Foreign governments from Beijing to Moscow and else [...]
Executive Summary: Mobilize the Regulatory Arsenal The incoming Biden administration has signaled through speeches, articles, and interviews that one of its top policy priorities will be combating corruption and kleptocracy.See Vice President Joe [...]
This paper is the first in a series on technology policy through the lens of national security, published in partnership with the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. Introduction Open societies have [...]
This piece originally appeared as a chapter in the Latvian Institute of International Affairs' book Towards #NATO2030: The Regional Perspective of the Baltic States and Poland. Introduction The Baltic region’s geography has been the single most im [...]
Introduction Europe is on the cusp of a crucial technological and political transformation. This year, most EU member states will need to finalize plans for building 5G networks, which will overhaul the way their economies function. Only a handful [...]
In mid-2020, the Alliance for Securing Democracy convened a task force of 30 leading American national security and foreign policy experts to devise a national strategy for the United States to offset autocratic advances in non-military domains of [...]
Executive Summary Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes in Competition for the Future Internet The United States and its democratic allies are engaged in a contest for the soul of the Future Internet. Conceived as a beacon of free expression with [...]
Russia’s disinformation tactics, techniques, and procedures are evolving. Stakeholders of all types—journalists, regulators, and researchers—must see the full picture of Russian activity as it is changing to anticipate what might be to come. Intro [...]
Executive Summary The United States, like many other democracies, faces concerted and sophisticated operations aimed at disrupting, delegitimizing, and in some cases altering the outcomes of its elections. While foreign interference operations are [...]